Online Video

Trends in Online Video

According to the comScore figures Internet users in the US watched over 16.8 billion online videos in April 2009. Almost 80 percent of Internet viewers say they watched at least one online video in the same month. This huge boom in viewing figures can be attributed to a number of factors such as huge advances in video for web compression and streaming technology, but, whatever the reason, the fact is that watching video online has entered the mainstream.

Of those billions of video views, over 40 percent can be attributed to YouTube, the phenomenal video for web sharing site that brought the concept of online video to the masses and made stars out of countless laughing babies and incompetent skateboarders.

History of Online Video

When YouTube first came to prominence in early 2006 there were two notable elements that enabled the young start-up with offices on top of a pizzeria to make internet users sit up and take notice. The first was the content. Despite all the attention given to minority interest, user-generated content, the real draw of YouTube was the range of beloved clips allowing visitors who came to the site for any reason to stay and watch more and more of the videos they loved.

The second key to YouTube's breakout success was their ability to place video for web anywhere, at a time when people were only just beginning to experiment with blogging.

Great content and easy access to that content turned hundreds of millions of users into contented consumers of video.

Once it became clear that people were content to watch video on their computers, it was obvious that business was going to co-opt this new medium into their online strategies. In those early days there seemed to be little middle ground. Companies did one of two things:

a. Invested a large budget in making their video for web as close to a TV advertisement as they knew how.

Or

b. Attempted to catch viral lightning in a bottle by inviting content-generating users from communities like YouTube to provide user-generated content.

Online Video For Business

Once the dust settled after the viral video explosion, marketers were left wondering exactly what impact their efforts had produced. It seemed in the first wave of video for web that nobody was concerned with how it would generate a return on investment

Too many companies got burned in the first rush to incorporate video into their site. Despite the relatively low barriers to entry, there was no guarantee of quality and while most marketers would tell you that they wanted video on their site, not many of them could tell you why.

Why Video?

Websites often need to convey sophisticated and complex information. Online studies have proven that such information can be communicated more effectively through the use of video, as opposed to the use of text and graphics only. This makes video the ideal medium for:

• Guiding users through complex procedures
  
• Delivering compelling calls to action
  
• Creating powerful branding messages
  
• Communicating a product's value proposition
  
• Promoting new events, features, etc.
  

Rather than a goal all by itself, video for web needs to serve the site it sits in. It is not enough to deliver a fancy-looking movie on a site's home page. Instead, video must be part of a holistic strategy for the particular page it appears on. With a clear strategy in place online video can provide many benefits:

• Generate more leads
  
• Increase website conversion rates
  
• Enhance customer experience
  
• Improve profitability
  
• Enhance brand recognition and value
  

Once online video is subjected to some measure of accountability it becomes an important revenue-generating element for a website with its own conversion metric and ROI model.

Conversion is the New Traffic

Up to this point the only metric for a site's success has been increased traffic. Marketing spend has been funneled into a series of PPC programs in order to drive more and more users to visit a site in the knowledge that a fixed percentage of them will convert into subscribers, users or customers. By shifting some of the focus towards online video, marketers are now able to increase the percentage of conversions without increasing the overall marketing budget.

Increasing conversion is the most cost effective way of growing revenue for a site. An engaging video is the sharpest way of increasing conversion.

EyeView offers marketers the only end-to-end video for web solution that covers everything from video creation and distribution through to the crucial aspects of testing and recommending for conversion optimization.